The Uni4m Guide to Christmas Marketing

By Joel Nekooie

The festive season is here, and businesses should be ready to cheer.

The truth is, Christmas comes around much earlier in our world of social media marketing, as brands all assemble to launch exciting campaigns during a time of fun and originality. Christmas, even to non-marketers, is widely known to be an incredibly lucrative period which can drive a great deal of traffic to your business; a solid social media strategy is the way to achieve this seamlessly.

It’s been a rollercoaster the past few years however, and consumer behaviours are changing, so building the correct strategy around Christmas is more important now than ever.

Since we know the ins and outs of online marketing, we’ve put together this simple guide to ensure that your marketing efforts will result in a successful festive period and maximise your brand awareness — we all know that landing sales brings the real joy to your holiday.

Quick Checklist

Check your list and check it twice.

Before we head straight in, below is a quick summary of the key elements you will need to consider for mastering your social media strategy this Christmas:

Now, let’s dive into the details.

Set Your Targets

First and foremost, what are your campaigns aiming for this festive season? Identifying your main goals and objectives will help paint the picture for a powerful marketing structure. Your goals could be:

Increase brand awareness
Drive engagement
Generate leads
Build a community

Whatever they may be, once your goals are set in place, planning your social media campaign will be a breeze.

Plan Ahead

Preparation is the key to online marketing at Christmas, and this is because brands tend to see an influx of customers around this period. That means that you’ll need to get a head start on your promotional material if you’re expecting a successful outcome.

Why exactly does this give you such an advantage over competitors? There are several answers, but the intention is to keep this guide simple. Essentially, starting on your strategy early will allow more time for you (or your team) to brainstorm ideas, conduct enough research into industry trends or the ever-changing audience behaviours in order to adjust, and create any appealing visual assets that you may need.

As a social media agency, we know just how time-consuming it can be to generate viable ideas, build unique assets, and develop bulletproof media strategies. That’s why we strongly encourage brands to begin running their promotions early, even months in advance would be ideal (so keep that in mind for next year, too). As such, liaise with your design and development team to cook up the essentials, which will save you from wrangling in the middle of a hectic period.

One effective method to stay organised and aid the planning of your campaign is to create and utilise social media calendars. This is a staple in any media team due to the clear overview it provides for how content will be distributed across multiple channels.

Know Your Audience

Looking at past campaigns and reaching a conclusion is extremely common and, generally speaking, a good way of determining the best seasonal marketing approach for your brand. Historical data can be very helpful as many concepts that have worked previously can always be refreshed, however, it is important to keep in mind that the audience landscape is changing. In fact, 2022 has seen a drastic change in consumer behaviours which brands should not be overlooking.

Numerator’s holiday report is particularly interesting with regards to recent consumers trends, which includes data on the impact of COVID-19 and inflation. 89% of consumers expect inflation to affect their holiday shopping, which is why special offers are everywhere.

We’re not necessarily saying that drawing comparisons and noting down the things that were a hit with your audience last year are wrong or ineffective, but we are suggesting that you be cautious when it comes to historical data.

Understanding your audience is a big step, figuring out what the trends are and what they are expecting to see from your brand. You can do this easily by frequently keeping tabs on recent holiday trends through trending or news pages, producing brand reports, and simply staying active. After conducting thorough research, you can adjust your overall plan accordingly.

Optimise Your Content

For optimal results, your content should be bringing some real magic to the holiday season. This means you should focus on producing content that is interesting and relevant to audiences, to encourage them to engage with your campaign. The bonus here is that Christmas is a time where you can really explore different forms of content, i.e., fun content to pull users in. This can include Stories relating to festive activities, Reels, Christmas countdowns, themed competitions, and much more.

The takeaway here is to tighten the reins on your content (not the reindeer) and be versatile. Spice up your design assets and check your surroundings for further inspiration. Most importantly, make sure that you’re integrating enough interactive material during this time, which we’ll also break down in the following section.

Interact

Interactions don’t conjure up out of nowhere, your brand should be actively trying to post enjoyable content which will capture attention online. A simple way of interacting is by asking open-ended questions, such as “What’s on your Christmas list this year? Comment below.” It’s not just limited to questions though; you can take advantage of quiz or poll features on the various platforms to create an even more amusing experience.

Including interactive posts adds great value to your content, and once you invite users to engage, another window opens up for generating revenue — see how they link together? We cannot stress enough how easy it is to encourage audience interactions through the topic of Christmas; plus, it’s essential to building trust. Easy as mince pie!

User-Generated Content

User-generated content (UGC) is interactive content that is created by your existing followers and is particularly effective when you’re aiming to heighten engagement rates. This form of content can assist in gathering a loyal audience as it welcomes honesty and outlines your brand as authentic, which is key during such an important time of year.

Starbucks is a fantastic example of quality UGC content with their white cup campaign, which fed the cultural phenomenon surrounding their famous cups. The hashtags #GiveGood, #RedCupArt, and #whitecupcontest generated plenty of buzz as the company asked their customers to decorate plain white Starbucks cups and post photos of their designs online, with the winner’s design to feature on future ceramic cups. With many famous artists becoming involved, this creative and interactive event went viral and proved the power of UGC on social media.

Videos for Extra Spice

Videos, videos, videos! When you’re seasoning your content to excellence, do not neglect the impact of videos. As the main source of engagement, video content is absolutely necessarily for grasping interest and disseminating your campaign on social media, and not just in the winter season.

Whether you decide to use humour, emotions, or something educational in your video content, this will increase shareability and add that extra spice needed to propel your brand into the spotlight.

Branded Hashtags

Using branded hashtags can help your content stand out in the sea of creative feed posts, making your brand more memorable and unique. Limiting your pages to generic hashtags like #christmas may not get you the attention your business is striving to achieve, so including a consistent hashtag of your own can boost discoverability and drive engagement. These can be used on all forms of content: videos, text posts, event-related content, and more.

Let’s take international fast-food chain, McDonald’s, as an example. Their huge #ReindeerReady campaign always pops up in the UK and, without fail, lifts the festive mood in every corner.

We created a branded hashtag for our international client, IMMAF, to augment interactivity for our most recently developed campaign. Taking on a ‘World Cup’ theme, the #IMMAFKOWC has been our own fun take on the biggest sporting event in the world, introduced specifically to gain that extra traction to close out an eventful year. We’ve found that interactions have been significantly higher throughout this competition. Speaking of numbers…

Track Your Progress

Forget the Santa tracker for now, put some time aside to gather up your data and keep track of your progress. Monitoring analytics and online activity is a vital part of social media marketing, because we need to be aware of how our content is performing across the different platforms. Keeping a close eye on those digits and audience reactions will undoubtedly help to improve your online engagement during the holiday season.

As touched on earlier, engagement rates are likely to be much higher throughout this period; therefore, understanding your content performance is crucial when crafting the ultimate marketing plan and will facilitate future projects too.

Wrapping Up

And that’s our guide, all wrapped up.

Those are the main factors to absorb into your campaign if you want to keep it cool this Christmas. We’re hoping that our gift to you this season can help give your brand that extra push into the festive spirit and go out of 2022 with a bang.

Is that gingerbread we can smell? Maybe, but mainly the smell of major brand success.

Happy Holidays!

For further guidance on perfecting your social media strategy, don’t hesitate to get in touch this season at info@uni4mbrand.com